Wednesday, January 14, 2009

Google Axes

Not even Google is immune to the recession. Announced today, 6 Google products are being either shut down or scaled way back.

Webware has the details, but I thought I'd call out a couple that held a special place in my heart:

Google Catalog SearchAlthough I understand that it was becoming less and less useful in this day and age, I've loved having this as a secret weapon ever since we stumbled onto it in the iNetNow days. I believe Scott Whinery gets the credit if I recall correctly. This was one of the first secret "lab" type Google projects we were ahead of the curve on and it always came in handy for really obscure product requests from clients. (I actually used it a couple of weeks ago while researching gourmet pepper corns.) Plus it really gave us clout as Internet experts to throw out "Have you tried Google Catalog search?" every now and then.

Google NotebookEerily similar to the Zuma "track URL" functionality, though I never really got into using it for real world projects. This isn't actually being shut down, but active development is stopping. It has more or less been replaced by some combination of del.icio.us, Backpack, or Google's own bookmarks and search-wiki type structures nowadays, but I definitely recall the "we were on to something!" elation when Notebook came out and and it mirrored a lot of the whistles and bells regarding excerpts that BoRyan had built into latter day versions of Zuma's first killer feature.